FT Alphachat

The United States may not have an infrastructure crisis. It may in fact have too much infrastructure. And what does that word "infrastructure" even mean, anyway? We talk about the history internal improvements, public works, and the power of a group that called itself The League of American Wheelmen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Armon Rezai of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Lint Barrage of Brown University talk to Colby and Mark about how climate change will affect home values and retirement portfolios — you know, middle-class wealth.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Tooze, economic historian and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, joins the FT’s Brendan Greeley and Brown University’s Mark Blyth to discuss how our politics got us to where we are today, why our ideas about how the economy works may not be fit for purpose, and the key role that China played during the Great Recession and continues to play today. They also discuss the central importance of global capital flows for understanding our world and why global liquidity may be much more fragile than we like to think. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The 2017 tax cut in the US included a provision that would forgive capital gains taxes, if invested for ten years in an "opportunity zone" — a low-income area designated by a state governor. But the idea of encouraging investments in poor and mostly black areas has a long history. We talk to Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia and Andrew Schrank, a sociologist at Brown University.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Author of the standard textbook on macroeconomics, former head of research for the International Monetary Fund, currently at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Olivier Blanchard works in the place where economists and politicians attempt to talk to each other. He talked to us about how the financial crisis changed his thinking on models, why state debt isn’t always and everywhere a bad thing and why the best forecasts in the future might come from artificial intelligence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The economist and president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics joins FT Alphaville’s Colby Smith and Brown University’s Mark Blyth to discuss the politicking of central banking, the hurdles to finding a US-China trade war resolution and how China can manage the financial risks building in its economy. They also touch on the enduring power of the dollar and US markets. Colby Smith is a writer for FT Alphaville and Mark Blyth is the director of the William Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute at Brown University.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A bonus episode from the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Atlanta this past weekend. Brendan Greeley caught up with Yale economist and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, who argues that if you want to understand markets you have to understand stories — how they start and how they spread. They talked about the stories driving share prices down in December, about Jim Cramer and about the narrative power of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Economists like to talk about the "slack" in the labour market. But how can we measure it, and what does it mean? The FT's Brendan Greeley hosts with guests Megan Greene, chief economist at Manulife Asset Management, Ioana Marinescu, economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Mark Blyth, director of the William Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute at Brown University.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The economist and University College London professor joins Alphaville's Jemima Kelly to discuss the question of value: who creates it and who makes use of it. She also lays out her argument for a rethinking of the relationship between markets and governments. It's the subject of her recent book, The value of everything: making and taking in the global economy.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Economist Gary Loveman was teaching at Harvard Business School when he went to consult for the Harrah's casino chain in Las Vegas in the late 1990s. Despite knowing nothing about gambling, his insights on customer loyalty earned him a promotion to the chief executive job at the casino group. He took a company that traded at $14 a share and a decade later sold it to private equity for $90 a share. Gary Loveman talks to the FT's Sujeet Indap about how data science is helping executives draw in customers across industries. Music by Podington Bear. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.